My Life in Pieces (27 page)

The first preview was astonishing. It was as if the audience had been waiting for the play for years. They ate it up greedily and the ovation at the end was like the roar of the ocean. I had never and have never quite experienced anything like it. And it was like that every time we did the play. Many factors were responsible, not least Scofield at his most complexly, sexily dangerous, and the play’s theme – successful mediocrity and its revenge on genius – rang bells with many people. But in the end I believe that what it was all about was music: music as the expression of the spirit, music, one might say, as God’s voice. Shaffer and Hall unerringly chose moments from Mozart’s output – the adagio of the great Wind Serenade, the Masonic Funeral music, the finale of
Figaro
, the
Requiem, of course – which expressed the sublime. This was the hunger that the play fed, for something beyond the realm of compromised life, for the absolute. And Shaffer’s brilliantly melodramatic edifice superbly stage-managed those moments. It was that which sent shivers round the auditorium for every single night over the course of the two years that we played the play, and it was that which transformed Mozart from being a hugely admired composer into being the idol of millions. The film clinched it. I can think of no other instance of a work in one medium so deeply affecting the perception of another.

Shaffer had done it again. There is something uncanny about Shaffer’s
ability to hit the nail on the head quite so resoundingly, a knack not pos
sessed by any other dramatist of the twentieth century. I wrote this piece
about Peter Shaffer for the
Daily Telegraph
to commemorate an auspi
cious (if rather overdue) event.

It seems only the other day that Milton Shulman was complaining that while actors and directors routinely received knighthoods, playwrights – without whom there would be no theatre – seldom or never did. Someone up there must be unexpectedly responsive to the testy old Canadian, because there has since been a positive rush to the Palace, with Ayckbourn, Stoppard and Hare all bending a knee within the last couple of years; Pinter conspicuously remains a commoner, presumably from choice. One curious omission will be rectified later this month when Peter Shaffer is shoulder-tapped by Her Majesty. A unique and often controversial figure among modern dramatists, for three decades he produced a series of massively successful plays which tackled huge themes in a spectacularly theatrical manner, making him the playwright who forced the mainstream audience to think about the big ideas of their times. In a series of large-scale public plays from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Nineties –
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
,
Equus
,
Amadeus
,
Lettice and Lovage
,
The
Mask of the Gorgon
– he put these ideas into general currency in a way that only the theatre can, being, as John Osborne famously remarked, a minority art with a majority influence. Imperialism, psychiatry, creativity, terrorism, modern architecture: these were all dramatised and debated in his plays at the National Theatre, on Broadway and in the West End, but not drily, not dialectically.

Not for him the intensely focused intellectual argument of a Frayn or the severe and savage historical analysis of a Bond or a Hare. His background is liberal humanistic; his concern is the dilemma of the individual faced with the loss of certainty in the world, sometimes in the form of ritual lament – the death of the Sun God in
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
– sometimes tragedy – Salieri’s increasing conviction that his God is not a benevolent one – sometimes farce: Lettice and Lovage’s declaration of war on modern architecture. His dramatic method is frankly one of seduction: he loves, and has always loved, since childhood in Manchester, the theatre theatrical: music hall, pantomime, opera, melodrama. He loves language, especially rhetorical language. Although as far from Brecht politically as could be, he has been very happy to use Brecht’s theatrical practice, the outward forms of the Epic Theatre. He loves actors and has written some of the most challenging and rewarding roles of the twentieth century. He especially relishes a theatre duel, allowing Atahuallpa and Pizarro, Strang and Dysart, Mozart and Salieri, Lettice and Lovage, to slug it out to the great excitement of the crowd. Above all he has a genius for crystallising his themes into theatre imagery which tells the story unforgettably and in a way which could only happen on a stage (with the single exception of
Amadeus
, radically rewritten with its director Milos Forman, Shaffer’s plays have proved irredeemably uncinematic). Atahuallpa appearing metamorphosed in the great golden sun; Alan Strang, riding his horse (impersonated by an actor in silver hooves, with a head of wrought metal); Mozart at the piano turning Salieri’s feeble march into
Figaro
’s ‘Non più andrai’. They constitute pure theatre, as, sublimely, does
Black Comedy
, its action played out in the dark: the audience can see the characters, though they cannot see each other.

It’s worth noting that his plays, apart, perhaps, from the early
Five Finger
Exercise
, are not at all autobiographical. In person Sir Peter – who celebrates his seventy-fifth birthday this week, too – has very little of the epic about him. Consummately urbane, he is one of the most wickedly amusing conversationalists on either side of the Atlantic, and brings an atmosphere of contagious hilarity with him wherever he goes. His circle of friendship, across the globe, is enormous; his audiences – also enormous – love him too, sensing, quite rightly, that he loves them, which is by no means always the case with dramatists, knighted or otherwise.

Shaffer’s plays (
Amadeus
was no exception) normally leave the public
stunned. He plans his last lines very carefully, shocking and satisfying the
audience in equal measure. There is a silence, and then the roar of
approval begins. I had never, up to that point (and not all that much since,
alas) been exposed to quite so much sheer volume of applause. It was of
course entirely delightful, but it took some adjusting to. The
Guardian
asked me to write this piece, which they called
Darling, We Were Wonderful
, in 2008.

One of the most universally held beliefs about the theatre is that performers are applause junkies, living for that moment at the end of the evening when they step down to the footlights and gratefully accept their reward. My own experience – and, I think, that of many of my colleagues – has been rather different. Most of us do not view the curtain call with relish. What matters much more is what has passed between us and the audience over the course of the evening – especially if it’s a musical – but even then, it’s the minute-by-minute interplay (as often as not silent) that really counts, the sense of communication, the engagement with an audience. It is generally the case that an audience who have laughed and applauded a great deal during the show will be less forthcoming at the curtain call: they’ve done their bit, and the final bringing together of hands is more a formality than anything else. An audience who have sat silently through a show often burst into vivacious applause at the end – a great relief, though baffling. What was holding them back?

The chemistry of a thousand people sitting together in a room, watching a play, is endlessly fascinating – the way they sometimes react as one from the beginning, or stubbornly refuse to come together, or respond only to a show’s broad physical comedy, or sometimes to nothing at all, beginning, middle or end. But the fact is, something needs to happen at the conclusion of the show: we all need closure. What form this should take is a delicate question. Both the cast and director rather dread the day when the curtain call is set. Partly this is to do with the niceties of hierarchy within the cast, those unspoken but very real gradations of fame and distinction balanced against the size of a role and its impact in the show. The complexities of these protocols are infinite and can lead to tears when the procedure is announced, generally with a promise that it is merely temporary and will be refined before the press night (this is
rarely true). Should Sir X or Dame Y, with their distinguished cameos, have precedence over Miss Z, who just left drama school last month but whose part is three times the length of theirs put together? Should the three supporting actors take their calls together even though only one of them is getting all the laughs? There is an element of ego in this, of course, but also the consideration that the audience wants a chance to show their enthusiasm for an actor who has particularly dazzled or who is dear to their hearts. (It can sometimes work the other way. On one production I directed, after a fraught technical period and the cancellation of a number of previews, I nipped into the leading actor’s dressing room to give a quick account of a rough curtain call that would, of course, be only temporary. ‘X comes on here, Y comes on there and then you come straight down the centre stage,’ I said. ‘Why,’ this immensely distinguished artist enquired, ‘should I carry the can for this pile of shit?’)

In the 1970s, I acted with the theatre group Joint Stock. We were performing, among other things, David Hare’s austere play
Fanshen
, which examined a radical realignment of society – one which, the play suggested, might be worthy of imitation. It seemed inappropriate, after thus throwing down the gauntlet, to come on to our hopefully chastened bourgeois audience all beams and bashfulness, so we experimented with various different ways of ending the evening. The first was to come on and stand in front of the audience – not bowing, not grateful, just standing there, in a sombre row. Resembling as we did a line-up of dangerous criminals in a police identification parade, we soon cowed the audience into
silence, then shuffled moodily off. Next we attempted the Russian method of applauding the audience ourselves. The result was that the audience felt deprived of their one moment of self-expression, and stopped clapping. Our final innovation was the most radical: we just didn’t come on at all. That shut ’em up pretty damn quick. In the end, we just did what everyone does: we came on and took our applause.

For some actors, there is an awkwardness about appearing in front of the audience as themselves rather than in character: many actors who appear to be gloriously free spirits during the performance suddenly become crippled with self-consciousness at the curtain call. Some actually remain in character, or take on another character, which is them-as-faithful-servant-of-the-public; in the days when leading actors used to make speeches after every performance, they created a persona in which to address their public, giving another performance. For others, there is a
residual resentment about seeming to ask for approval, some race memory of a servant–master relationship between actors and audience that outrages their democratic souls and leads them to stare balefully out into the stalls, as if they were inmates in a prisoner of war camp who had just been forced to perform in front of the Gestapo.

For tragedy, or plays about child abuse and Third World debt, a demeanour of some dignity is appropriate. An actor who has just played Richard III or Mother Courage may legitimately betray some symptoms of exhaustion – Sir Donald Wolfit liked to emphasise this by hanging on to the curtain – though playing the lead in a light comedy can be just as draining. There, sweat-free urbanity is expected, as if giving the show had been, as it was for the audience, a mere prelude to supper. In the end, the curtain call is a sort of good manners, like not rolling off and falling asleep after making love. It says, on both sides, ‘Goodnight, lovely seeing you, thanks so much, see you again.’

As an actor, you only think about applause if it doesn’t happen. My first play in the West End was with Harry Secombe. Every night when he got home, his wife, Myra, would ask him: ‘Did you get your claps tonight?’ But it’s a faulty kind of index. Rather than thinking, ‘What a wonderful reception I got tonight,’ you’ll be thinking, ‘Why wasn’t it as good as the night before? What are we doing wrong?’ And there is, too, a danger that the public will feel disappointed if they haven’t cheered and clapped enough. American audiences tend to perform themselves much more than British ones. There the true orgasmic fulfilment of the evening tends to be at the curtain call, rather than during the performance. When I’ve worked as a director in the US, I’ve often received friendly advice on how to engineer a standing ovation – the Holy Grail of performance Stateside. ‘Get the guys to hold hands, Simon, and then run down to the audience and then, on a count, fling their arms right up in the air. It works, perfect, every time.’ I regret to report that it does.

In my view standing ovations should be reserved for something utterly out of the ordinary. I was lucky enough (as an usher at the Old Vic) to see Laurence Olivier on stage many times. He never once got a standing ovation. Maggie Smith once did get a standing ovation for her Hedda Gabler, but that was because the whole of the Swedish Embassy had booked the front row. Needing to get to dinner very quickly, they had stood up as a man, and the rest of the audience simply followed suit.

Still, a performance needs a formal ending of the contract between audience and actors – a handshake, as it were. In
A Midsummer Night’s
Dream
, Puck says to the audience: ‘Give me your hands, if we be friends/ And Robin shall restore amends.’ In Peter Brook’s sublime production, the actors did just that: they left the stage, came into the auditorium and grasped the audience’s hands. It was the most perfect resolution to an evening’s theatre I ever saw.

Amadeus
was a hit of a rare order. Even people who never went to the
theatre, politicians, for example, felt they had to have been able to say
that they’d seen it. Although the reviews were decidedly mixed, for all of
us – and some of them were downright abusive about my performance –
we were the talk of the town. At the next word run-through of
As You Like It
, Greg Hicks, who was playing Silvius, said to me, by no means envi
ously, ‘So you’re famous now, I suppose?’ It was nothing but the truth. We
were all cheered, every night, but the ovation that greeted Scofield was
extraordinary, an expression of fealty, or primitive, almost tribal, acclaim;
he took it superbly, with a half-smile followed by a sharp, small bow fol
lowed by a graceful extension outwards of his arms, opening out the
palms of his extraordinarily expressive hands in a gesture of benison. The
public felt embraced and blessed. Contact with him on stage, night after
night, was enriching in ways that even now I find hard to analyse. His
death, thirty years later, hit me harder than I could possibly have imag
ined. I was touring in
Equus
, sitting in a taxi heading for the station to
take me to Milton Keynes, the next venue on the road, when a text mes
sage from a friend appeared on my phone saying: ‘So sorry about
Scofield.’ I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. Then the phone
rang: it was BBC News wanting a reaction. I gave one, an inadequate,
numbed one, then I called the
Guardian
and asked if I could write some
thing more considered about him. They said I had two hours to write it. I
did it on the train heading for Milton Keynes, and immediately emailed it
from my dressing room in the theatre.